Popular Culture and the Future of Politics

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics PDF Author: Ted Gournelos
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739137220
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park argues that progressives should conceive the connections between media, policy, and culture beyond the limits of 'politics' and 'news.' With sustained analyses of groundbreaking contemporary examples of what has become known as 'convergence culture,' Ted Gournelos brings together a wide range of media without sacrificing depth. His examples, such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Onion, The Daily Show, Chappelle's Show, and The Boondocks, are chosen for their political scope and social impact and demonstrate the ways in which what we know as 'politics' is rapidly changing. The book's forays into established fields like feminist, race, and queer theory are combined with perspectives drawn from political economy and rhetoric to demonstrate the power of irony, humor, and cultural dissonance in modern approaches to dissonant cultural politics.

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics PDF Author: Ted Gournelos
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739137220
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park argues that progressives should conceive the connections between media, policy, and culture beyond the limits of 'politics' and 'news.' With sustained analyses of groundbreaking contemporary examples of what has become known as 'convergence culture,' Ted Gournelos brings together a wide range of media without sacrificing depth. His examples, such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Onion, The Daily Show, Chappelle's Show, and The Boondocks, are chosen for their political scope and social impact and demonstrate the ways in which what we know as 'politics' is rapidly changing. The book's forays into established fields like feminist, race, and queer theory are combined with perspectives drawn from political economy and rhetoric to demonstrate the power of irony, humor, and cultural dissonance in modern approaches to dissonant cultural politics.

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics PDF Author: Ted Gournelos
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780739137215
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park argues that progressives should perceive the connections among media, policy, and culture beyond the limits of "politics" and "news". With sustained analyses of groundbreaking contemporary examples of what has become known as "convergence culture," Ted Gournelos brings together a wide range of media without sacrificing depth. His examples, such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Onion, The Daily Show, Chappelle's show and The Boondocks, are chosen for their political scope and social impact and demonstrate the ways in which what we know as "politics" is rapidly changing. The book's forays into established fields like feminist, race, and queer theory are combined with perspectives drawn from political economy and rhetoric to demonstrate the power of irony, humor, and cultural dissonance in modern approaches to dissonant cultural politics. Popular Culture and the Future of Politics approaches popular culture's treatment of events, social norms, and political shifts through three techniques by which political discourse can be reframed, negotiated, or opposed. It incorporates discussions of contemporary U.S. media policy, the structural changes incurred through the emergence of the internet, and political developments over the past decade, and suggests that contemporary popular media can combine with a self-consciously oppositional branding strategy to allow and encourage new types of activism. Book jacket.

Back to Our Future

Back to Our Future PDF Author: David Sirota
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345518802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past. In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama). Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.

Popular Culture and World Politics

Popular Culture and World Politics PDF Author: E-International Relations
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910814024
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This edited collection brings together cutting edge insights from a range of key thinkers working in the area of popular culture and world politics (PCWP). Offering a holistic approach to this exciting field of research, it contributes to the establishment of PCWP as a sub-discipline of International Relations. Canvassing issues such as geopolitics, political identities, the War on Terror and political communication - and drawing from sources such as film, videogames, art and music - this collection is an invaluable reader for anyone interested in popular culture and world politics. Contributors include: Jutta Weldes, Christina Rowley, Constance Duncombe, Roland Bleiker, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Linda Ahall, Nicholas J. Kiersey, Iver B. Neumann, Michael J. Shapiro, Nick Robinson, Daniel Bos, Saara Sarma, Matt Davies, M.I. Franklin, Robert A. Saunders, Kyle Grayson, and William Clapton."

Culture, Politics and Climate Change

Culture, Politics and Climate Change PDF Author: Deserai A. Crow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113510333X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Focusing on cultural values and norms as they are translated into politics and policy outcomes, this book presents a unique contribution in combining research from varied disciplines and from both the developed and developing world. This collection draws from multiple perspectives to present an overview of the knowledge related to our current understanding of climate change politics and culture. It is divided into four sections – Culture and Values, Communication and Media, Politics and Policy, and Future Directions in Climate Politics Scholarship – each followed by a commentary from a key expert in the field. The book includes analysis of the challenges and opportunities for establishing successful communication on climate change among scientists, the media, policy-makers, and activists. With an emphasis on the interrelation between social, cultural, and political aspects of climate change communication, this volume should be of interest to students and scholars of climate change, environment studies, environmental policy, communication, cultural studies, media studies, politics, sociology.

Globalization and American Popular Culture

Globalization and American Popular Culture PDF Author: Lane Crothers
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742566835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A third edition of this book is now available. Now in a fully revised and updated edition, this concise and insightful book explores the ways American popular products such as movies, music, television programs, fast food, sports, and even clothing styles have molded and continue to influence modern globalization. Lane Crothers offers a thoughtful examination of both the appeal of American products worldwide and the fear and rejection they induce in many people and nations around the world. Concluding with a projection of the future impact of American popular culture, this book makes a powerful argument for its central role in shaping global politics and economic development.

Environmentalism in Popular Culture

Environmentalism in Popular Culture PDF Author: Noël Sturgeon
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816548277
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species? Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.” The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination PDF Author: Henry Jenkins
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479891258
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

Entertaining the Citizen

Entertaining the Citizen PDF Author: Liesbet van Zoonen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742529076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Can politics be combined with entertainment? Can political involvement and participation be fun? Politics and popular culture are converging all the time, whether it's in Arnold Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California or in political television dramas and movies like The West Wing and Dave. This book encourages readers to think about how links between entertainment and politics have the potential to rejuvenate citizenship, endorse civic values, and sustain civic commitment. Instead of discarding the popular as irrelevant or dangerous to the democratic process, Liesbet van Zoonen shows us the possibilities for increasing political knowledge and participation through the arenas of politics and popular music, political "soaps," political television dramas, and politicians as celebrities. A first-rate starting point for debate, Entertaining the Citizen will stimulate and entertain students and general readers alike.

Popular Geopolitics

Popular Geopolitics PDF Author: Robert A. Saunders
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351205013
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book brings together scholars from across a variety of academic disciplines to assess the current state of the subfield of popular geopolitics. It provides an archaeology of the field, maps the flows of various frameworks of analysis into (and out of) popular geopolitics, and charts a course forward for the discipline. It explores the real-world implications of popular culture, with a particular focus on the evolving interdisciplinary nature of popular geopolitics alongside interrelated disciplines including media, cultural, and gender studies.